Stunning Hypocrite Rand Paul: Killing US Citizens With Drones Is A-OK! (Video)

by Omar Rivero/Americans Against The Tea Party: 

Today on Fox business,Tea Party “darling” and Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul elevated his hypocritical tirade against the federal government to a whole new level.

During a 13 hour filibuster in March, and after sending a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him to clarify whether American citizens could be killed in drone strikes, Paul declared, “No American should be killed by a drone strike on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court.”

Showing his true colors as a hypocritical opportunist, today Rand Paul dropped his guard and candidly contradicted his previous stance with a poorly thought-out answer:

“Here’s the distinction: I have never argued against any technology being used when you have an imminent threat, an act of crime going on. If someone comes out at the liquor store with a weapon and $50 in cash, I don’t care if the drone kills him or a policeman kills him. But it’s different if they want to come flying over your hot tub or your yard just because they want to do so surveillance on everyone, and they want to watch your activities… We should not be willy-nilly looking into everyone’s backyard at what they’re doing. If there is a killer on the loose in the neighborhood, I am not against drones being used to search them out, heat-seeking devices being used.”

Of course, I do not expect Fox Business viewers or Tea Party “patriots” to catch the glaring hypocrisy of a Senator that wasted 13 hours of congressional time to proclaim that “no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court” and then turns around and says he has “no problem” with a drone killing an American that robs a liquor store at gunpoint, but I wrote this article in hopes of displaying just how little water the convictions of these libertarian tea party “patriots” hold.

While Tea Party members and Libertarian Republicans marvel at the consistency and conviction of their leaders, any honest assessment of their words and actions will find a never-ending supply of cynical and carefully planned contradictions designed to ferment anti-government paranoia and maintain the corporatist status quo.

Please do your part in shining a light on these contradictions by sharing this and other related articles so that all of America can see the truth!

Attorney General Eric Holder: President can’t kill non-combatant with drone strike

By Agence France-Presse

Attorney General Eric Holder made clear on Thursday that a US president does not have the power to order a drone strike against a “non combatant” American inside the United States.

Holder’s clarifying comment came in a short letter to Senator Rand Paul, who mounted a 13-hour, non-stop filibuster in the Senate demanding answers from the administration on the scope of drone policy.

“Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” Holder asked in a letter to Paul. “The answer to that question is ‘no.’”.

Paul, an idiosyncratic, libertarian Republican, mounted the filibuster delaying tactic into the early hours of Thursday against the nomination John Brennan to head the CIA.

He had demanded a clarification from the administration to ensure “they are not going to kill non-combatants in America” bringing a new US perspective to a row raging over the use of US drones against terror suspects abroad.

On Tuesday, Holder had said that, while Obama had “no intention” of ordering drone strikes on US soil, the scenario could be possible if there was an “extraordinary circumstance” such as an attack similar to 9/11.

Paul said after he received the letter that it showed his battle was worthwhile.

“The reason this is important is often drones are used overseas (against) people who are not actively engaged in combat,” he told reporters.

“I’m not saying they’re not bad people or they might have previously been in combat, but the thing is, we have to have a higher standard in our country.”

Paul’s action won praise from some Republicans and those conservatives who see him as the heir to his father Ron Paul’s quirky coalition in presidential campaigns.

But critics questioned whether he was truly engaging on a point of principle and worried that he was scaremongering, since no US official had seriously mooted the use of drones against US citizens on home soil.

“The president has not and would not use drone strikes against American citizens on American soil,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

“Those legal authorities that exist to use lethal force are bound by and constrained by the law and the Constitution.

“The issue here isn’t the technology. The method does not change the law. The president’s sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, and he is bound by the law.

“Whether the lethal force in question is a drone strike or a gunshot, the law and the Constitution apply in the same way.”

What Rand Paul Really Thinks About Drones

By Hayes Brown/Think Progress

While Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) undoubtedly won the DC news cycle on Wednesday with histwelve-hour long filibuster against CIA Director nominee John Brennan, his opposition to drones is not as all-encompassing as you would think.

The coverage of the filibuster fixated on what appeared to be Paul’s unwavering opposition to the use of unmanned vehicles, commonly called drones. As Paul made clear, though, he was only speaking in opposition to their use in anarrow sense, as part of a targeted killing ordered against a U.S. citizen on American soil.

While the White House has so far ignored calls to declassify the Department of Justice memos laying out the administration’s legal argument, it has explained that drone strikes could not Constitutionally be carried out against an individual who was not an imminent threat, effectively answering Paul’s limited question.

Paul’s opposition to the use of drones began with his concerns about their use for surveillance purposes against U.S. citizens without a warrant. To this effect, Paul introduced in 2012 what he called the “Preserving Freedom From Unwarranted Surveillance Act,” that would ”prohibit the use of drones by the government” without a warrant. The Pentagon has pushed back against the need for this new legislation, arguing that the laws that apply to manned aircraft — such as small airplanes and helicopters — would necessarily apply to unmanned drones as well.

That worry about drones is not universal for Paul, however, as he’s less concerned when it comes to enforcing border security via drone. Laying out his stance on comprehensive immigration reform, Paul published an op-ed in the Washington Times making clear that he felt that border security had to be addressed before a path to citizenship could be enacted:

Border security, including drones, satellite and physical barriers, vigilant deportation of criminals and increased patrols would begin immediately and would be assessed at the end of one year by an investigator general from the Government Accountability Office.

Though he did not make it clear, it can be assumed that Paul was referring to drones of the unarmed variety, rather than advocating launching Hellfire missiles at immigrants attempting to cross the border.

Paul’s concerns about drones have also yet to extend into their use as a weapons platform in combating terror overseas. While holding the floor of the Senate, the junior Senator from Kentucky repeatedly acknowledged that strikes in Pakistan and Yemen have shown themselves effective. Paul also several times referenced the use of the tactic known as “signature strikes,” where groups of men between 16-55 who meet a certain profile are considered legitimate targets. These references were only spoken in opposition to the transfer of the tactic to being used against Americans, as Paul said he “didn’t want to say” whether their use as part of astrategy of targeted killing was in the right.

Rand Paul No Progressive Hero, Despite Anti-Drone Filibuster

by Adele Stan/Alternet

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is winning plaudits from progressives for his 13-hour filibuster [2], launched Wednesday morning, against President Barack Obama’s nomination of John Brennan to the post of CIA director. While Brennan deserves to be ditched for his failure to speak up against the CIA’s use of torture and the administration’s drone assassination program, Paul’s Mr. Smith move [3] is less one of courage than one of political opportunity.

Instead of lauding the anti-woman [4], anti-civil rights [5] neo-libertarian senator, progressives would do better to ask: Why have all the Senate Democrats signed onto the Brennan nomination?

Just last week, John Kiriakou [6], a former CIA agent who blew the whistle on the U.S. Government’s torture program, began a two-and-half year prison sentence for having done so. Meanwhile, in his nomination hearing before the Senate, Brennan admitted that, while serving in the CIA’s number two spot, he never spoke against the agency’s practice of torture. And now, through the acquiescence of Senate Democrats, he’s to lead the agency.

And instead of applauding Rand Paul’s ostensible bravery, why are his progressive fans offering scant analysis of his motives [7]?

It’s important to recall how Rand Paul made his way into the Senate in the first place, and who put him there [8], namely the neo-libertarian Tea Party-fomenting astroturf group, FreedomWorks, and the Senate Conservatives Fund led by Jim DeMint, the former senator from South Carolina who now leads the Heritage Foundation. Those two organizations backed Paul’s primary challenge to a candidate hand-picked by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky’s senior senator, as a reminder to the Republican leader that he’d better toe the Tea Party line. And he has.

In his anti-drone filibuster, which admittedly offered C-SPAN viewers an often-enlightening education on the Obama administration’s flouting of the U.S. Constitution in its pursuit of al Qaeda and the Taliban, Paul also played to his paranoid base, suggesting that the U.S. Government was targeting survivalist right-wingers as potential terrorists and might soon be launching drones against them.

As right-wing activist Lee Stranahan tweeted [7]: “I believe what Rand Paul is doing is showing how to run for president in 2016.”

What Rand Paul did last night was to put on an awesome show that won him a lot of attention. And, yes, it was gratifying to hear Spencer Ackerman [9], of Wired’s Danger Room site, and The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf [10] name-checked on the Senate floor for stellar journalism that asks the hard questions [9] about the Obama administration’s claim [10] that it has the right to assassinate U.S. citizens -- even on U.S. soil -- in particular circumstances. (Yes, really.)

And it was surely entertaining to listen to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, read tweets on the Senate floor, when he was dispatched by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to give the Kentucky libertarian a break, and to state that the “technical term” for what was going on with Twitter right now because of the #standwithRand hashtag, was that is was “blowing up.”

However riveting that all was, it was horrifying to see noted progressives using that very same hashtag simply because no Democrat was willing to make as dramatic a stand against having a torture apologist and assassination strategist for a CIA director -- not to mention an attorney general who is game to give cover to the unconstitutional actions of the administration.

But to stand with Rand means to lend support to a showman who opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act because he thinks private owners of public establishments, such as restaurants, should be able to turn black people away on the basis of race. It means giving a patina of honor to a man who held up a flood relief bill in order to attach an amendment that would give civil rights to a zygote to “end abortion once and for all.”

Courage? I suppose you could say George Wallace was courageous when he defied a federal order to integrate the public schools of Alabama. Rand Paul’s courage springs from the same well.

Progressives would do better to lean on politicians who claim to embrace the progressive agenda, and make it impossible for them to support the likes of John Brennan.